A five-and-a-half-foot-tall, tailless squirrel.

I moved my stash yesterday. I realized as I did it that it was squirrel-like behavior. I wasn't moving nuts. I AM nuts.

I have moved my stash at least four times in three years. It has been in plastic tubs, plastic bags, wire bins, a closet, and now it's in two rooms of my house. It is ranked according to how much I love it. And that's just wrong. It's far more often than I've sorted through and shifted my books, of which I also have way too much for this little bitty house. But I pare them down more ruthlessly than the yarn, so it's not quite as bad.

My husband's old computer armoire, that thing I've tried to love for the last three years, still looms over the living room. I hate having my computer in it, I tried, it made me claustrophobic, so I went back to my nice open Pottery Barn desk, and filled the massive cherry armoire with crap, and yarn. And this is stupid, because I want my desk in the living room, so this office can be a true craft room because it has french doors to close to keep the curious felines out, and great light. I really want to sell that cabinet. I have procrastinated about it because it is the catcher of all odds and ends, but that's another good reason to get rid of it.

So yesterday I decided to clean the yarn (hey, it's a major start) out of the cabinet. And I did. And I realized that whatever I spend my $700 of profit-sharing-that-didn't-go-directly-into-savings on, it is NOT going to be yarn.

I have yarn. I have nice yarn. I have yarn for nice things I wanted to make when I bought the nice yarn. And this is the curse of reading knitting blogs, because the nice things I bought the nice yarn for got pushed aside by other nice things inspired by things other people were knitting, and that brought other nice yarn, and on and on we go, until I have, if I really ramped up my knitting productivity, about three years of yarn on hand. I have sweaters and baby blankets and shawls and socks and bags and hats and more baby blankets. Linen and cotton and merino, oh my! I rode a number of knitting trends - felting, socks, charity hats. I didn't get to stuff like the Clapotis until the Cool Knitbloggers were done with it and it was so last season, but I did get to it. All of this contributed to the stash that invaded Florida.

I did note some holes in the stash, but they are not yet ripe for filling. I want to make Boy a nice afghan/throw for his new home, but I can buy that yarn in Asheville, after I check out the color scheme and decide what would work. I'm thinking Log Cabin because that Mason-Dixon book has the power to burn itself into your brain, but it may end up being a nice solid neutral throw. We'll see.

Meanwhile, I will work my way through the stash, and work on sweet, easy projects, like baby blankies for grandchildren to be identified much later. Girl laughed at my pink feather-and-fan Softball Cotton baby blanket in progress, because she figures she is a few years from grandchild production. I pointed out how long it takes me to finish anything. She admits that I may be getting a late start.

So I am into production knitting of the stress-relief kind, and not a skein of anything comes into this house until Asheville. That's about 2 months, give or take a week, because I haven't decided which week I'm going. And I may - it's true - buy no yarn at all there.